Until very recently, mind–body dualism has been regarded with deep suspicion, by both philosophers and scientists. This has been due, amongst other things, to the widespread, if largely unspoken, identification of dualism in general with Cartesian dualism in particular. This traditional version of dualism has long prompted numerous criticisms from philosophers and has been almost universally rejected as untenable in most scientific circles. However, in the last few years new attention has begun to be paid to the dualistic point of view, not least as a result of increasing discontent with the dominance of reductionism in contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. Most importantly, awareness has grown that dualism does not need to coincide with its Cartesian variety: other forms of dualism are philosophically defensible which do not share the conceptual difficulties encountered by Descartes’s version of it and are better able to cope with the sorts of objections commonly raised by scientists. Today, interest in dualism more broadly construed is growing fast, because it appears that, suitably formulated, it constitutes not only an intuitively plausible philosophical point of view but also an approach to the human mind that is based on scientifically acceptable assumptions.

This book is a collection of essays divided into two main parts with an aim to provide an up-to-date overview of current developments in dualist conceptions of the mind in contemporary philosophy and science. The chapters in the first part look at how dualism is currently regarded in a number of different scientific fields of inquiry. The second part of the book is devoted to the exposition and defense of five different ways of being a philosophical dualist. Each of these essays defends a specific form of dualism, assessing its merits in comparison with other positions in the philosophy of mind that are currently fashionable.

The first part of the book contains four essays investigating whether a dualistic perspective can fruitfully be applied in tackling scientific problems in physics, the neurosciences, and psychology. In the first essay Henry M. Wellman and Carl N. Johnson describe the developmental trend of naïve dualism, namely, of that common sense stance which is shared by adults almost worldwide and that leads people to conceive mental states and processes as radically different from material objects. Alessandro Antonietti’s contribution takes as starting point the conclusion of the previous chapter. Must common sense psycho-physical dualism also be shared by psychologists? Antonietti addresses the question at an epistemological-methodological level and concludes that the dualistic co-presence of psychological and neuroscientific discourses appear to be necessary at this stage of the development of the two forms of knowledge. The other two scientific contributions to this volume make plausible that, starting from the quantum physics, a dualistic worldview including autonomous mental causation plausible. Friedrich Beck argues that a dualistic dimension can be found in quantum mechanics as regards the particle vs. wave nature of microscopic entities. Ian Thompson, on the other hand, emphasizes the role of the concept of a disposition. According to Thompson, the mind predisposes the brain to perform some physical processes which correspond to the intended mind’s goals; in other words, the mind selects a function to be carried out by the brain through spatiotemporal patterns of neural activation.

The reflections put forward by the physicists Beck and Thompson find an echo in the first philosophical contribution of the second part of the volume by Franz von Kutschera. The author, after criticizing idealism on the basis of the argument that there exist physical phenomena which are not correlated to mental phenomena, also rejects physicalism for three reasons. Von Kutschera argues that the reciprocal dependence between the physical and mental which comes to the fore in quantum physics is a constitutive feature of the psychical life. The main aim of Uwe Meixner’s essay is to show that the difficulties inherent in physicalistic monism can be overcome only through acknowledgment of the presence in the human being of two irreducible dimensions, the physical and the mental one. In the third essay, E. Jonathan Lowe proposes two alternative arguments, the argument of replacement and the argument of the unity of the self against the two arguments put forward by neo-Cartesian substance dualism, namely, the conceivability argument and the indivisibility argument in his defense of non-Cartesian substance dualism. In her contribution, Antonella Corradini proposes a dualistic variant of emergentism. Among the philosophers, David S. Oderberg is the one who places the most emphasis on the issue of cognitive capabilities of the human being by insisting upon the categorical difference between intellective and sensory knowledge.

This book is clearly distinguished from others in its field by the fact that its contributors do not limit themselves to reconstructing the history of dualism or to discussing competing points of view concerning the nature of the human mind in contemporary science and philosophy. Rather, they propose and defend their own versions of dualism in a dialectical confrontation with other positions in the philosophy of mind and in science, both reductionist and non-reductionist.

This volume offers a rich panoply of ways of approaching the vast and deep set of questions and issues that arise when we explore the difficulties arising from the subjectivity of mental by a thorough and deep examination of the resurgent dualistic currents of thought. I think, this is a very useful collection of essays for professional academics and researchers working in various disciplines, ranging from philosophy and theology to the natural and the human sciences. I believe it is also extremely useful to students taking suitably related courses in several of these areas. I heartily recommend this book to any educated reader who has an interest in exploring questions concerning the human mind both from the perspective of modern science and from that of philosophy.

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